The Queen's Fool Read online

  She turned to her court. “We will dine,” she announced out loud. She walked alone, head up, toward the doors to the great hall. As she went into the dark interior she paused and threw a glance at Lord Robert over her shoulder. I saw the invitation in her look, and almost like a moment of dizziness, I recognized that look. I had seen that very same look before, to the queen’s husband King Philip. And I had seen that look before then, when she had been a girl and I had been a child: to Lord Thomas Seymour, her stepmother’s husband. It was the same look, it was the invitation of the same desire. Elizabeth liked to choose her lovers from the husbands of other women, she liked to arouse desire from a man whose hands were tied, she liked to triumph over a woman who could not keep her husband, and more than anything in the world, she liked to throw that look over her shoulder and see a man start forward to go to her side — as Lord Robert started now.

  Elizabeth’s court was a young merry optimistic court. It was the court of a young woman waiting for her fortune, waiting for her throne, certain, now, that it would come to her. It hardly mattered that the queen had not named her as heir; all the time-serving, self-serving men of the queen’s court and council had already pledged their allegiance to this rising star. Half of them had sons and daughters in her service already. The visit from Count Feria was nothing more than another straw in the wind which was blowing smoothly and sweetly toward Hatfield. It told everyone that the queen’s power, like her happiness, like her health, had waned. Even the queen’s husband had transferred to her rival.

  It was a merry, joyful summertime court and I spent the afternoon and night in that happy company. It left me sick and chilled to the bone. I slept in a little bed with my arms tight around my child, and the next day we rode back to the queen.

  I made sure I did not count how many great men and women we passed on the road to Hatfield, going in the opposite direction. I did not need to add to the sour taste of sickness in my mouth. Long before this day, I had seen the court move from a sick king to a waiting heir and I knew how light is the fidelity of courtiers. But even so, even though I had known it, there was something about the turn of this tide that felt more like the dishonorable turning of a coat.

  I found the queen walking by the river, no more than a handful of courtiers behind her. I marked who they were: half of them at least were the dourest most solid Catholics whose faith would never change whoever was on the throne; a couple of Spanish noblemen, hired by the king to stay at court and bear his wife company; and Will Somers, faithful Will Somers, who called himself a fool but had never, in my hearing, said a foolish word.

  “Your Grace,” I said, and swept her my curtsey.

  The queen took in my appearance, the mud on my cloak, the child at my side.

  “You have come straight from Hatfield?”

  “As you commanded.”

  “Can someone take the child?”

  Will stepped forward and Danny beamed. I set him down and he gave his quiet little gurgle of pleasure and toddled toward Will.

  “I am sorry to bring him to Your Grace, I thought you might like to see him,” I said awkwardly.

  She shook her head. “No, Hannah, I do not ever want to see him.” She gestured for me to walk beside her. “Did you see Elizabeth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did she say of the ambassador?”

  “I spoke to one of her women.” I was anxious not to identify Lord Robert as the favorite at this treacherous alternative court. “She said that the ambassador had visited to pay his compliments.”

  “And what else?”

  I hesitated. My duty to be honest to the queen and my desire not to hurt her seemed to be in utter conflict. I had puzzled about this for all of the ride back to court and I had decided that I should be as faithless as the rest of them. I could not bring myself to tell her that her own husband was proposing marriage to her own sister.

  “He was pressing the suit of the Duke of Savoy,” I said. “Elizabeth herself assured me that she would not marry him.”

  “The Duke of Savoy?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  The queen reached out her hand and I took it and waited, not knowing what she would say to me. “Hannah, you have been my friend for many years, and a true friend, I think.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Hannah, sometimes I think I have run mad, quite mad, with jealousy and unhappiness.”

  Her dark eyes filled with tears. I held tightly to her hand. “What is it?”

  “I am doubting him. I am doubting my own husband. I am doubting our marriage vows. If I doubt this then my world will fall apart, and yet I do doubt.”

  I did not know what to say. Her grip on my hand was painful but I did not flinch. “Queen Mary?”

  “Hannah, answer me a question and then I will never think of this again. But answer me truly, and tell no one.”

  I gulped, wondering what terror was opening up beneath my feet. “I will, Your Grace.” Inwardly I promised myself that if the question endangered me, or Danny, or my lord, I would allow myself to lie. The familiar tremor of fear of court life was making my heart flutter, I could hear it pounding in my ears. The queen was white as a shroud, her eyes madly intent.

  “Was there any suggestion that the king was pressing his own suit?” she whispered, so low that I could hardly hear her. “Even though he is my husband, even though he is forsworn before God, the Pope, and our two kingdoms? Please tell me, Hannah. I know that it is the question of a madwoman. I know that I am his wife and he could not be doing this. But I have become filled with the thought that he is courting her, not as a pastime, not as a flirtation: but for his wife. I have to know. I am tortured by this fear.”

  I bit my lip, and she needed nothing more. With the quick apprehension of a woman seeing her worst fear, she knew it at once.

  “Dear God, it is so,” she said slowly. “I thought that my suspicion of him was part of my illness, but it is not. I can see it on your face. He is courting my sister for marriage. My own sister? And my own husband?”

  I clasped her cold hand between my own. “Your Grace, this is a matter of policy for the king,” I said. “Like making a will to provide for the future. He has to provide in the case of your accident or death. He is trying to secure England for Spain. It is his duty to keep England safe, and in the true faith. And if you were to die, sometime in the future, if he were to marry Elizabeth after your death then England would remain Roman Catholic — and that is what you and he wanted to secure.”

  She shook her head, as if she were trying to hear my rapid words but none of them made any sense to her. “Dearest God, this is the very worst thing that could ever have happened to me,” she said quietly. “I saw my mother pushed from her throne and shamed by a younger woman who took the king from her and laughed as she did it. And now this woman’s daughter, the very same bastard daughter, does just the same thing to me.”

  She broke off and looked at me. “No wonder I couldn’t believe it. No wonder I thought it was my own mad suspicion,” she said. “It is the thing I have feared all my life. Ending up like my own mother, neglected, abandoned, with a Boleyn whore in triumph on the throne. When will this wickedness stop? When will the witchcraft of the Boleyns be defeated? They cut off her head and yet here is her daughter rising up like a serpent with the same poison in her mouth!”

  I gave her hand a little tug. “Your Grace, don’t give way. Not here. Not here before all these people.”

  I was thinking of her, and I was thinking of Elizabeth’s court who would laugh till they cried if they heard that the queen had broken down because she had heard at last what all of Europe had known for months — that her husband had betrayed her.

  She shook from head to toe with the effort; but she drew herself up, she blinked back the tears. “You are right,” she said. “I will not be shamed. I will say nothing more. I will think nothing more. Walk with me, Hannah.”

  I glanced back at